Range Description

This species is found in northeast India, Myanmar, Thailand, Indochina, and southern Yunnan (China) (Lekagul and McNeely 1977). There is an old record from western Guangdong (China). In India it is found from 30 to 1,950 m (Choudhury pers. comm.) and Datta (1999) confirmed current occurence at about 27°N in India. Records from Nepal are historic and may differ from what is today recognized as "Nepal" (Hodgson 1836- holotype for subspecies) - and there have been no subsequent records since (Pralad Yonzon, verbally; see also Hinton and Fry 1923). Records from northern Viet Nam need to be checked in Museums and further investigated (Roberton pers. comm.), although there is a record confirmed from Yanbai (Thomas 1922); other records may not have ruled out M. moschata from the identification. Distributions of species in Cambodia and Lao PDR are highly speculative and based on few verifiable specimens (Duckworth et al. 1999 pers. comm.): A skull of this species was found Khammouan Limestone National Biodiversity Conservation Area in early 1998 (Robinson and Webber 1998a), and "the species was previously common on the Bolaven Plateau (Osgood 1932, Delacour 1940)." [from Duckworth et al. 1999]. The distribution in Myanamar north to 22˚N is well supported by validated individuals, but there seem to be no post-1950 records identified to species (Pocock 1941, Than Zaw et al. in press). This is the only species of the genus confirmed to occur in Thailand, and hence records of the genus are routinely assumed to relate to this species. In fact, M. moschata might also occur too (and was even mapped, apparently predictively, by Storz and Wozencraft 1999). Melogale moschata and M. personata are very similar in external morphology, and field records, including skin specimens lacking an associated skull, need to be considered as identifiable only as Melogale sp. throughout the parts its range where M. moschata is known to occur or might plausibly do so (effectively, this is all the known range). Only reference to skull characteristics should be used for species-level identification. Thus, in Myanmar, Thailand, Lao PDR, Viet Nam, Cambodia and India there is continued difficulty of identifying recent records of ferret badgers to species, most of which lack skulls or did not have the skull characters checked and were not preserved. Hence it is impossible to say anything about this species’s current distribution, status or ecology in these regions.